Type: Game-Changer

Funded by Bristol-Myers Squibb

Neuroblastoma is the second most common tumor in childhood accounting for 7% of all children with cancer. There are about 800 new cases of neuroblastoma each year in the US. Treatments for neuroblastoma include surgery when tumors are localized or chemotherapy and radiation therapy when tumor spreads to other parts of the body. Cure rates are high for low-risk children, but only about 50% for high-risk children such as those whose tumor has spread. For these reasons, neuroblastoma is still the deadliest cancer in the childhood. With our research we aim at increasing the cure rates of neuroblastoma, particularly in high-risk children. To achieve this goal, we will harness the immune system of the children by instructing their lymphocytes to specifically identify a molecule called ALK in tumor cells. To obtain the highest potency and accuracy, we will exploit not only one immunotherapy, but rather a novel dual immunotherapy that will combine a cancer vaccine with engineered lymphocytes, both primed to recognize the same ALK target on tumor cells. This novel concept of dual immunotherapy will be tested in mouse models of neuroblastoma and will provide essential information on how the immune system can be exploited to target this tumor. These findings will lay the foundation for future clinical trials that will exploit this dual immunotherapy approach in children.

V Scholar Plus Award – extended funding for exceptional V Scholars

It is now clear that our immune system has the capacity to both recognize and destroy cancer cells. Unfortunately, tumor cells escape this immune-mediated destruction by activating inhibitory switches to turn off T-cells. These switches, called immune checkpoint receptors (ICR), are now being targeted in early-phase clinical cancer trials in hopes of restoring and boosting immune-targeted killing of cancer.

However, despite showing promise in animal models of cancer, it remains unclear whether drugs targeting more recently identified ICRs will work in humans. Most importantly and a major focus of this proposal, while ICR therapies were previously assumed to bind and target only immune cells as noted above, our data newly identifies ICR expression directly on cancer cells along with therapeutically promising anti-cancer as well as pro-tumorigenic activities. What’s more, levels of cancer cell-ICRs could be dynamically regulated by cytokine stimulation. Overall, these findings raise unanswered questions on ICR-specific drug safety, specificity, potency and optimization that challenge existing, even false, assumptions within the immunotherapy field and invite further inquiry of these entirely unexplored tumor-intrinsic pathways.

This interdisciplinary proposal functionally dissects one particular tumor cell-expressed ICR and its undiscovered roles in cancer progression. As our seminal data reveals that it powerfully regulates cancer growth and metastasis, this research lays the groundwork for developing innovative drugs to block cancer advancement. Results will not only raise awareness of unanticipated impact of ICR drugs on a new tumor-intrinsic pathway but also invite further scientific and therapeutic inquiry and exploitation of this undefined pathway in cancer.